


Love's a stranger (until I see you again)

by blueberrywizard



Series: Brooklyn Days [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: A little bit of angst, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Endgame Fix-It, Happy Ending, I just wanted something soft okay, I'm ignoring everything between tws and endgame, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Endgame, Pre-Captain America: The First Avenger, Romantic Soulmates, Snapshots, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, THE TINIEST, also also:, also:, no beta we die like women, this fic is what would happen if soulmates au and hanahaki au had a baby together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:07:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23132914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueberrywizard/pseuds/blueberrywizard
Summary: "One of Steve’s sketchbooks was dedicated to flowers only - he drew various body parts with all the flowers he could imagine on them, and sometimes, in the middle of drawing his next picture, he also tried to imagine how his own flowers will look like and where on his skin it’ll appear. He imagined roses on his back or sunflowers on his arms. On the most shameful of moments he imagined tiny violets on his face, left by, always warm, Bucky’s hands."(or a couple of looks at the world, in which wherever your soulmate touches you during your first kiss, there are flowers left on your skin)
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Brooklyn Days [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1345867
Comments: 3
Kudos: 121
Collections: Stucky: Canon Divergence





	Love's a stranger (until I see you again)

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Love's a stranger (until I see you again)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20326924) by [blueberrywizard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueberrywizard/pseuds/blueberrywizard). 



> This fic is a mess and I know it. I didn't really plan on translating it, but my uni is temporarily closed and I'm already bored out of my mind. Preventive quarantine is a nightmare, so please stay safe, wherever you're reading it. We'll get through it soon, I know it. 
> 
> English is not my first language, and while I think I'm getting slighly better at translating my own fics, I'm afraid there might be some grammatical errors. I always write long sentences and then they bite me in the ass. 
> 
> Title borrowed from [Love's A Stranger](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSJdhd0stAg) by Warhaus. It's a great song and it gives a nice vibe for this fic.

Lilac haunted Steve his whole life.

When Sarah Rogers came to New York, she had possessed only one suitcase - brown and well-worn, but there was a one thing hidden, really carefully, beneath her blouses and skirts, that had any value to her: a bottle of perfume, the last present from her husband, before he had been shipped to a war.

She would have never thought that their first anniversary will also be their last one.

Steve remembered that his mother had smelled like lilacs only on a special occasions and yet, this smell reminded him of her more than anything else. Besides, he  _ wanted _ to remember the lilacs instead of a bleach and unique hospital smell that always clung to her clothes. 

Lilacs were the only flowers he associated with her mother. She had no flowers anywhere - neither on her hands, nor on her face. He couldn’t see them on her skin under the blouse when it accidentally moved up. Steve only once asked her about them. She said, crisply:  _ we never kissed and then I met your father _ and then they never spoke of it again. Steve knew there was some story behind mother’s vague answer, but he didn’t know why she decided to keep it a secret. When he was younger, he liked to imagine them - their hair, their eyes, if they were kind to her, if they made her smile. Later, he understood that there are things you need to put behind, because you’ll never go back to them. You just can’t.

In their neighbourhood there wasn’t many people that got their flowers, but if they did, they always had them in visible places. Small daisies on hands and fingers, wrists covered in bountiful dahlias, peonies on necks and lilies on forearms. One of Steve’s sketchbooks was dedicated to flowers only - he drew various body parts with all the flowers he could imagine on them, and sometimes, in the middle of drawing his next picture, he also tried to imagine how his own flowers will look like and where on his skin it’ll appear. He imagined roses on his back or sunflowers on his arms. On the most shameful of moments he imagined tiny violets on his face, left by, always warm, Bucky’s hands.

Bucky only once caught him with this particular sketchbook. He never commented on what he had seen, but Steve noticed in his eyes something more than just curiosity.

It was hunger.

* * *

Future had managed flowers so much better than his own generation. Everyone seemed to be so open (although Steve’s reaction when he was told that racism, bigotry and homophobia are still a thing, wasn’t something that he could be proud of) about them, telling stories of them and their loved ones, without shame, without any fear. Steve was used to ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy, but it’s not like anyone had asked him about them. Apparently, in twenty-first century people assumed that they know everything about him, only because they read a couple of history books or watched a documentary in TV.

And yet, they knew nothing about him.

They couldn’t know that his flowers were climbing up on his hips, starting almost on his thighs and ending where he usually put his hands on a belt. They couldn’t know about lilac that reminded him of a laurel wreath, but without purpose - after all, there was nothing to celebrate. Not now, not ever.

They couldn’t know whose this lilac was and they were never meant to know.

* * *

Army never kept any records about flowers on soldiers’. Of course, if one of them wanted to make a specific annotation, mostly because it could help in case they died on a battlefield, they could request it, but these kinds of information weren’t exactly necessary when it came to an effective fight for America. 

SSR however, kept their records more detailed. Most of them were scientist, after all, and there weren’t much data about flowers - any knowledge might have been useful in the future. Peggy Carter secretly managed to destroy almost half of these having Steve Rogers’ name in it, so public knew only that James Barnes had been wearing his flowers proudly on his face and neck. It was engaging an endless stream of discussion among historians, both professionals and amateurs. Who was James Barnes’ soulmate? Small forget-me-nots were easy to hide under beard, and yet, Barnes never seemed to do it. Nobody knew why and nobody knew who gave them to him, because Barnes never told anyone. Not a single word came out of his mouth about them.

Peggy Carter knew things. And she was perfectly aware that kiss, stolen quickly in a car, was never meant to give her flowers.

* * *

Bucky always seemed to be more interested in flowers than Steve was. He had been curiously observing people in their neighbourhood, and then he tried to interpret their flowers. He never approached the subject of which one he would prefer to have, but Steve recalled one conversation they had, when Sally Johnson came to school on a Monday morning with tulips on her right hand. Bucky smiled in the same manner he used to do, when he thought that Steve, defeated by high fever and cough, had been already sleeping.

He smiled as if he had been looking at something he desperately wants, but he could never have.

Steve didn’t particularly care about any of this, back then. He knew that one day he’ll see flowers on his body, and if he’ll be lucky enough, maybe he’ll live to see him getting married.

He wants Buck to find someone he’ll be happy with, someone who’ll give him the prettiest flowers.

Even if there isn’t any chance that it could be his hands.

* * *

There’s no greater symbol of obedience than silence.

The ability of voicing opinions, loudly and freely, is giving people bigger power than they’re aware of. People don’t understand how much power a spoken out loud sentence can have, what it can do, how many barriers can fall down because of it. Probably that’s why it’s so easy - but as an outcome of a really sluggish process - to convince whole societies to give up on this right. After all, who needs freedom of speech if there’s a terrifying enemy behind our doors?

HYDRA was excellent in this.

They started from one person. It was almost as if he was begging to be silenced, and several people, who had been working on him, were so pleased to gag him and cover his face. They couldn’t look at the flowers, because to them, it meant weakness.

Weakness was unacceptable.

Otto Müller was one of the last scientists working on him, before he was transferred to Russians. Müller loved beauty of an irony, and the most beautiful irony he had ever seen, was the one that made a man, forced to forget everything, wear on his face  _ forget-me-nots. _

* * *

Steve wasn’t even aware how it came that his fingers hooked against Winter Soldier’s mask. In a matter of seconds, it was lying on a ground and he saw hiding beneath it forget-me-nots, crawling on the most beautiful jaw he had ever lied his eyes on.

He understood that cold, steel eyes of a murder were, in fact, Bucky’s eyes.

“Bucky?” He had to ask, he had to be sure that it’s not a hallucination, that he’s not delusional yet.

“Who the hell is Bucky?” His voice, raiding his nightmares so often, never sound that flat. Impersonal.

Steve hated himself for giving up.

* * *

Everything was different now.

Calmer. Slower. Quieter.

Steve appreciated perks of this lifestyle, mostly because it was something Bucky and he had dreamt about since more or less 1938. He even warmed up to animals, seeing how much joy gave him taking care of them. He was fairly sure that Bucky was talking to ducks about him, but he didn’t mind, because ducks didn’t gossip.

His sketchbooks were full of drawings, like it had been before. He couldn’t see how much he missed it only after he picked it up again. Pages full of forget-me-nots and the love of his life, covered in black leather, were laying on every surface in their house. Bucky only smiled whenever he saw one of them.

He liked lazy evenings the most, when they sat together in front of the fireplace and Bucky had been reading something out loud while Steve tried not to fall asleep, laying on his lap, just like before the war. Bucky wasn’t so loud like before, but he hated silence and he hated being silenced. And Steve sometimes needed to stop talking, so evening were more than satisfying to them.

However, Steve couldn’t focus on a main plot from the book that Bucky had been reading to him. Warm reflecting light reminded him of something from the past and he couldn’t stop a quiet laughter.

“What’s so funny, Rogers, hm?” Bucky always knew when Steve didn’t listen to him.

“You know that I once thought that I’ll be exceptionally happy if I’ll live enough to see your wedding? Thinking about the wedding itself were rather bittersweet, but I told myself that if I’ll live through that awful winter, I’ll manage being your best man. And look how it worked out.”

“Well, my best man - or rather best woman - was Nat and I’m pretty sure that she’s more competent at this shit than you could’ve ever been, Steve.”

“I should be offended, you know, but I actually agree with you. I would have probably started to cough my lungs out in the worst possible moment.”

“You would have lost the wedding rings before I could give them to you. That’s exactly why I asked Sam to do it. At least, he would have lost only mine instead both of them.

Steve burst out laughing, because Bucky was right, and indeed, one warm evening in July last year could have gone like that.

“Do you want me to read you some more?” Bucky asked a bit later, when Steve calmed down. “I think you missed one chapter, but I can summarise it for you.”

“No, that’s not necessary. Please, carry on.”

Bucky knew that Steve would be asleep in five minutes. He moved his hand towards Steve’s hip to lay precisely where lilac ended.

Lilac haunted Steve his whole life, but he found peace anyway.

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I wanted the flowers for Bucky and Steve to have symbolic meanings so here we go: lilac means "first love" (I also found somewhere that lilac means "my heart belongs to you" and I liked it); forget-me-nots means, obviously, "don't forget about me".
> 
> Thanks for reading this fic! If i can, I'd like to recommend you my other post-Endgame fic, which you can find [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22791598). And if you want to talk with me about anything at all (maybe a suggestion or a prompt, or simply to complain about how the world sucks) just leave me a comment!!


End file.
